


Avisheh and the Separator

by haemat



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, some juicy background story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-05-24
Packaged: 2019-05-13 07:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14744753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haemat/pseuds/haemat
Summary: This is some personal writing for a game project I'm currently working on called Natures Universe. Two of the antagonists share a history, and you'll get a hint at some of what that history is here.





	Avisheh and the Separator

"I know your real name," someone says, silhouette masking the light from the doorframe. The fledgling Separator snaps the thick book she was reading shut in a reflex, like she was caught doing something bad. Like she wasn't instructed to come to this room in the Nexus Temple daily until she was caught up with the rest of society, with the rest of the Nexus. Her world -- not her world, but a world she was born on and lived on and stayed on until very recently -- was vastly behind the world known as the Nexus. The Nexus, it seemed, knows everything there is to know about the secrets of the universe. Culture, technology, medicine, language, everything seems to move at a pace that the Separator has found herself quickly left behind by. Everyone seems to know worlds more than she does, and the Tetherer and her instructors have given her a strict study regimen to catch her up with everyone else. Still, the Separator moves with an antiquated rigidity that makes her feel vulnerable in ways she's both accustomed to feeling and has never experienced.

She absolutely hates it, just as much as she immediately hates the smug smile on this stranger's face as they look at her like they really have caught her doing something wrong. They haven't, she reminds herself. She's meant to be here, studying in the hours she isn't being tutored or mentored.

"The Separator is my real name," she says, and apparently refocuses her attention on opening her books and finding the line of text she's lost. Really, she is keeping this newcomer on the edge of her vision, carefully awaiting any strange moves. She's yet to shake her old habits from living on the streets of Tirazis, and her small knife remains tied to her ankle, a weight that she's painfully aware of in this moment.

After a moment of silence the stranger actually has the gall to laugh; they then press a raised portion of the wall down -- a switch, the Separator remembers an instructor calling it a switch -- and light suddenly illuminates the room. The stranger's face is illuminated as well, though her features remain dark as ever. Long, thick black hair, lightly browned skin with dark eyes and dressed in all black. As she crosses the mostly-empty tiled, unpatterned room to the center, her steps clicking and echoing with a strange stutter, which piques the Separator's curiosity enough to look up and see the stranger walks with a limp and a cane. On top of that, despite first glances blending both blacks of cloth and some harder material together, the stranger's flesh suddenly ends just above the knee and two shoeless false limbs complete the legs for her. The Separator isn't shocked by this, though she is idly surprised to see it as a truth of the world in a place so different from her once-home of Tirazis. It was common to see people with a few less limbs in a place where being born with a parasite marked you a leper and an outcast, just as the Separator herself was. She feels her own parasite stir beneath its bindings, and she pulls the wrappings on her left arm tighter to keep it quiet. 

"No one's said where you're from in the news feeds," the stranger says as she limps across the room. "But it's painfully obvious. Look at you trying to read by candlelight. You're like a..." She pauses, trying to remember the word. "A dinosaur, that's what you are. A creature born before the First Gods. Primal, feathered things with tiny brains a hundred times the size of Fars' largest birds." She reaches the tiny, cluttered desk the Separator sits in and blows out the candle sitting on top of a pile of texts, keeping eye contact with the Separator all the while. The Separator curls her lip in an automatic snarl and tries to ignore the woman in black entirely to focus on her studies, but they both know it's far past the point of keeping concentration any longer.

So this woman is familiar with her Earth, with Fars and perhaps even Tirazis itself. The fledgeling Separator is sure plenty of people in the Nexus are.

The stranger seems unperturbed, even encouraged by the Separator's silent treatment of her. The awful smirk on her face grows wider.

"Avisheh Razi. And no need to introduce yourself, Vida Veisi," she says, extending a hand to grasp in greeting. Vida's dark eyes snap to Avisheh's, past the offered hand, which is left hanging in the air. Avisheh laughs once more, her hand retreating and shaken off at her side, then grasping the surface of the Vida's desk to steady herself so she can let go of her cane.

Avisheh is a familiar name, but of course it is. Vida is from Tirazis, a large city full of Avishehs. A few could be called Razi, and a few could have two false legs and thick hair and plucked brows, but Vida wouldn't know, as she never was more than acquaintances with any of them. And certainly no one in Tirazis would wear a black sweater and black shorts and a black blouse, the color and style like nothing anyone ever wore in that world.

But they aren't in Tirazis, and Avisheh Razi is a woman of the Nexus, as much as Vida is learning to be.

"Why do you know that name, Razi?" Vida simply says, trying to choose her words carefully but curiosity overtaking her defenses.

"Avisheh is fine, thank you," Avisheh says, leaning over the desk and Vida is suddenly struck by the sheer height of her, long arms bringing to mind the thin limbs of a camel. "You wore your own name like a badge of honor once. Veisi, the capital-P-Parasitized who almost made it among the clean people. Vida, the woman with the living parasite and the damning touch. You may not remember, I may have had a different name and a different face, but we've met, you and I." A hard limb taps the floor and Vida's eyes follow the sound down to the plastic -- yes, the Tetherer said that is called plastic -- feet below, an ominous feeling cutting through the air with the sound. Avisheh calls it a damning touch. Vida thinks, before they met on Tirazis, that Avisheh must have had more flesh. Vida's heart is gripped by ice.

Avisheh's laugh is piercing and harsh this time, and Vida's widened gaze ricochets back to her face. "That's the face I like to see!" she says through laughter. "A woman who feels horror at the things she can do, not pride. I can hardly recognize you without that face."

"Your legs," Vida says simply, before remembering she should complete the thought. "The Parasitized removed them?"

"They're a fucked up bunch, but it's not as ghoulish as you're thinking," Avisheh says, still smiling dangerously. "I was all parasite from the knee down after you got to me. I didn't have them removed, though, until I was brought to the Nexus. Did it the wrong way, though. Did it myself."

Yet Avisheh seems so much more well-versed in the ways of the Nexus than Vida is, dressed as she is. "How long ago was this?" And how long has Avisheh been stewing in anger at Vida Veisi, the woman who ruined the shell of the life Avisheh barely had?

"Long enough that I can look back and laugh," Avisheh says, plopping an elbow on Vida's shoulder. "I'm not angry at you, Vida Veisi. Angry at the Parasitized, angry at the clean people, angry at the parents that dropped me off at the gardens, maybe. A little angry at the Tetherer, too. But not you. You're just an accident of something everyone thinks is a god, but I know who you are." She leans in close to Vida's face, and Vida's immediate thought is that she's moving in to kiss her on the cheek, but she stops short. "You're just another kid that got dropped off at the gardens."

Vida recoils in what might be disgust or something like it. Avisheh claims not to be angry, but she's clearly trying to hold something over Vida's head. Her old name, her history, her mistakes, something, maybe a lot of somethings, and Vida isn't -- the Separator isn't going to allow that. Not now, not after everything.

"One upon whom a parasite grows," the Separator says through a clenched jaw, "is not singular for being abandoned by their family. Neither of us can help the circumstances of our birth, whether by virtue of our parasites or our natures."

Avisheh laughs yet more, and the Separator hates the sound. "You sound like the Tetherer! Maybe you are really a Separator yet!" She brushes a finger through the Separator's hair, grinning condescendingly down at her, and the Separator jerks away from the touch. "Don't act like you know anything about me just because you were part of my life once. My parents didn't drop me off because I had a parasite. They were prepared to have a dirty child. What they weren't prepared for was to find their child hidden in her room, trying on ill-fitting dresses she acquired in secret." The Separator's look at that is blank, searching, ignorant, and Avisheh outright giggles at that look. "Try to piece that one together, Vida Veisi. Take your time with it, too."

The Separator does understand, then, and bites her tongue. Avisheh was never a name she knew personally. Avisheh came later. A child her age, a skinny one with knobby knees and thick parasites hanging from her shins, with short black hair, an uncertain voice, and an ill-fitting dress grasps Vida's thicker parasitized arm, calm to the searching touch of a parasite Separated into having a will of its own, pulls her deeper into the gardens. The skinny child tells Vida a name Vida can't remember now, and Vida lets her play with the veinlike parasites on her arm that wrap around fingers playfully in return. Vida is mature beyond her young years, always having to take charge with so many siblings before she left, and, despite their similarity in age, she soothes the child and feeds her long, purple-skinned shahtoot berries from the trees of the garden they hid in, soothes the child's fears. The child then takes Vida to some friends. They call themselves the Parasitized, not dirty but named, and they are very interested to see what Vida's touch can do to their parasites. Their leader chooses the first volunteer.

"How did you end up here?" Vida -- no, the Separator -- asks suddenly, pulling herself out of a hazy memory.

"Same as you, hilariously. But they were wrong about me," Avisheh says, picking up a book from the desk, sitting in its place, and thumbing through it idly, clearly not reading at all. "I can't Destroy like they thought I could. Maybe they're wrong about you, too."

"Maybe," the Separator says, lowering her gaze.

Avisheh snaps the book shut and taps it on the Separator's head. "I'm just teasing, Separator," she says. "I snuck in and saw the vids of what the gardens looked like after you got to them. Only a god could do that."

The Separator supposes that could be true. Avisheh is clearly not buying her godliness, and who knows what the rest of the Nexus -- what the Tetherer -- thinks of her ability. Not just of her nature and whether it's the right one, but of Vida herself. How she carries herself. She'll only ever have an imitation of the Tetherer's grace.

"Well, ring me if you want your parasite removed," Avisheh says, dropping the book on the floor rather than on the desk. The Separator glares at her. "I know it sounds like an empty offer coming from me, but I'm a surgeon these days. Licensed. And I'm much better at amputating than I was as a young one." She hops down from the desk, recovers her cane, and taps it against the Separator's foot in a familiar sort of farewell. The Separator feels the parasite on her arm stir suddenly, as if offended, and she clamps her other hand down on it, glaring at Avisheh.

Avisheh only laughs as she leaves.


End file.
